Langugae Study Plan

Does anyone else make a language plan? Do you set goals and make a calendar? Anybody have a preferred method to this. I have all my tools chosen and really want to start on making a good calendar of language learning activies. Advice?

Comments

Hahaha! Much more than that! I have 7 languages I am learning, and I am at different levels for each language. So I've developed a plan with watching tv, reading newspapers, vocab drills, chats, etc in order to immerse myself on the different languages 1 day each week. I'm not sure if it's a good plan, maybe I will become bored of it, but I just made the plan. Hopefully it works!

I did somewhat in the past, but now I am becoming more organized with my life. This helps me not stray from daily lesson if I set a daily goal. I have a planner in the mail actually to be more organised with all of it. It isn't just for language learning but I use it to realistically set time to practice in between work and other chores. I like to be specific and come up with a weekly plan that involves my interactive software, listening comprehension, translating lyrics, books, etc., and even plan on watching movies in the target language. I often find myself online talking about learning languages instead of actually learning them, so planning helps me in the long run.

Something that helps me with planning is to not plan so far ahead. I have my ulyimate goal, but if I plan weeks and months ahead, it can seem like an overwhelming and daunting task. Instead, I plan by day. I set goals for my day and do not think any farther ahead, allowing me to focus more on my immediate tasks.

I have to agree with Tanee about not planning too far ahead. I mean, it's great when one plans on being fluent after x amount of years spent studying a language but usually people give up if it seems like they aren't making a lot of progress after a certain amount of time. Therefore, I would suggest that you set manageable goals for yourself. For example, I will spend download music from the target language and listen to that whenever I go running. You could even try to learn at least thirty to fifty words per week or whatever amount you think is reasonable.

To give you a solid example, I always listen to Portuguese music whenever I go running in the morning, which is about a good thirty minutes of listening I would say. Before I did my study abroad program in Brazil, I also made sure that I learned about twenty five new words per week which were pertinent to my field of study (Biology) and everyday life. Both of these (at least the latter) helped me a lot when I first arrived in Brazil.

Thanks so much you guys for the great comments! To answer some questions it's not that suddenly I just wanted to learn these languages. Most of these languages I have taken a course in or have been learning half-heartedly for a while. Now I'm just taking the next step and finalizing my plan. Thanks for all your advice, here's what I've done:

Each day of the week will represent a different target language. I have gone through the internet bookmarking grammar pages, vocab lists, tv channels, newspapers, common phrases, language chat sites and even a culture blog for one of the languages. Each set is saved into a different bookmark folder for the target language. I'll wake up on that day, and throughout the day access that folder going through and doing each activity.

I'll keep a record and follow up if anyone is interested in knowing how it goes.

Again, I appreciate your help. Since I speak English, Japanese, and Spanish, I have these 7 languages to learn before my life goal of 10 languages is complete. These languages are: